Professor of Art Emeritus Robert McVaugh returned to Colgate University to present original research on the campus’s architectural history on Tuesday, Oct. 21. The talk, delivered to students and former colleagues in the Robert Ho Lecture Room, was the newest entry in the Arts and Humanities Colloquium series.
The presentation was the culmination of a years-long scavenger hunt through Colgate’s archives for misplaced campus architectural records. McVaugh was the first scholar to undertake such a study of Colgate’s architectural history.
According to McVaugh, the project began with the discovery of building records in Colgate’s facilities archives, a space used primarily by facilities workers for building management purposes. These documents were unaccounted for by official archives and at risk of deterioration in improper storage.
“It began […] when I was poking around the facilities archives, which was a room stuffed with [architectural] files and primarily used by plumbers and electricians,” McVaugh said. “What I discovered was that, in those drawers were documents which [dated as far back as] 1872 […] shoved in the bottom of drawers and badly labeled.”
McVaugh then worked with University Archives staff and members of the Colgate Art Department to properly archive the loose architectural drawings, hoping to preserve them for future generations of scholars.
In 2025, following the initial stages of the project, McVaugh received a grant from the Upstate Institute to continue his work on campus architecture after his retirement from Colgate faculty. The grant allowed him to expand his scope to the archives of architectural firms who had designed many of Colgate’s signature buildings. It was this, he said, that allowed him to piece together the narrative presented in Tuesday’s colloquium.
In her introduction of McVaugh at the talk, Professor of Art and Museum Studies Program Director Elizabeth Marlowe highlighted his dedication to the hands-on data collection process.
“[Professor McVaugh] spent the better part of a decade combing through archives, desk drawers, nooks and crannies in the village and on campus to put this story together,” Marlowe said. “This is really a body of knowledge that Bob created for us in a space where there had been none.”
McVaugh offered two major takeaways at his talk: that the concept of Colgate campus architecture has only recently (in the last half-century) shifted to incorporate the slope of the surrounding hill and recently constructed campus buildings represent the innovative ways in which architects balance this shift with Colgate’s signature building style.
“What happened at this period [in the 1980s and early 1990s] was that the architects found a way to marry stone, as a definitive characteristic of this place, and the traditions of masonry with volumetrically complex forms,” McVaugh said. “That allowed us to continue, in a coherent way, a tradition.”
McVaugh began by describing the initial vision for Colgate’s architectural aesthetic, which was a set of neatly aligned, box-shaped stone buildings atop the flat summit of the hill. He displayed early drawings of Colgate’s hill depicting the buildings that would come to characterize Colgate’s architectural style.
“Colgate architecture is a big stone box: it’s Lawrence [Hall], it’s West, it’s East, it’s Lathrop—God help us—it’s Wynn ,” McVaugh said.
For most of the talk, McVaugh outlined the environmental factors which caused the re-imagination of the box concept, including a lack of flat space, a need for expanded complexes in response to an enrollment explosion in the 1960s and 70s, and the rise of co-education and historical preservation movements.
While discussing the planning of Olin Hall—which stretched from 1956 to its opening in 1971—McVaugh noted that both Colgate’s buildings and the concept for them are ever-changing in response to administrative aims, the physical landscape and other, unexpected factors. These are the overlapping interests that later architects would come to successfully balance.
“[These buildings] are evidence of a few things that are important to us—one is the always challenging matrix of finance, aspiration and the logics of construction,” McVaugh said.
In the talk, McVaugh highlighted two buildings as exemplary of this balancing process: Frank Dining Hall, built in 1984, and Persson Hall, built in 1994. He said that these buildings made meaningful changes to the concept of Colgate architecture while retaining some important aspects of traditional architecture.
Before Frank, student dining was stationed in James C. Colgate Hall, a traditional Colgate building planted on the flat skirt of the hill. Because of expanding enrollment, then-university president George Langdon sought to construct a new dining hall in the western section of campus. However, Langdon’s preferred site could not accommodate a building in the existing campus alignment.
Yale School of Architecture alum Herbert Newman solved this problem by incorporating the geometric character of the original “boxes” into Frank’s structure while still rejecting a strict orthogonal alignment. According to McVaugh, Frank thus established a stylistic transition which allowed for further expansion into the area beyond Peter’s Glen.
Persson Hall, which sits on the once-barren “Cardiac Hill,” was a project for which McVaugh sat on the architectural selection committee during his tenure as a Colgate professor. In the talk, he recalled that the innovative treatment of the hill’s topography by architect Tai Soo Kim was a welcome defiance of architectural tradition.
“What Kim did was he brought his model in, we looked at it and couldn’t find the building, he reached under the table, he grabbed a piece of his model and plunked Persson Hall—really as we all know it—on the top of forbidden territory,” McVaugh said. “You could hear the relief on the committee.”
McVaugh said that Persson Hall’s significance lies in its incorporation of the hill’s slope into a design whose boxy, stone composition remains consistent with Colgate’s original buildings. It has since become Colgate’s signature view across Taylor Lake and a major influence on subsequent construction projects.
“If you think of buildings since then—the library, Little Hall—so many of them embrace the vertical flow of the hill,” McVaugh said. “This was the building that really changed the campus.”
Colgate first-year Megan Llewellyn-Jones, who attended the Tuesday lecture, said that she left the talk with a new perspective on the evolving nature of architecture on Colgate’s campus and beyond.
“One of my takeaways is how much the campus has transformed over 206 years, learning that architecture is a reaction to current situations and that historical buildings have gone through many iterations to the point of being unrecognizable to those from the past.”
